As his mouthpiece suggests, Foley could walk. What might that mean politically?
No this is not a provocation rather a careful reading of the evidence. The age of sexual consent as many have noted is highly complex and variable. Not only does it depend on the relevant jurisdiction, e.g. DC, 16, Federal law, 18, but it also depends on the age relationship of the participants, the so-called Romeo & Juliet rule. In centuries and millennia past, of course, many sexual liaisons now considered child abuse were simply a commonplace matter of survival and economic necessity. If the fundies read their Bible carefully they would be horrified by the child brides and child concubines that the patriarchs bedded. Sexual morality is not constant and absolute. All of that said, there is, I believe, unanimity that the age of consent in the US today is nowhere above 18. Foley more than anyone knew that, and probably acted accordingly.
Note his efforts to learn ages and birthdates, allegedly to send presents, but mainly to learn when precisely they would become legal meat. I would not be surprised to learn that in Foley's computer files there was a precise listing of the birthdays of all the male pages. Amidst the hue and cry about Foley's internet follies, we don't know the age of the interlocutors in his most sexually flagrant conversations. They might very well have been 18 or older.
However, and this is a big however, there can be no doubt that Foley treated the Congressional Page Program as a recruitment program, talent search, for his later conquests. This was a minor league system in which Foley scouted out likely ephebes, boy later man friends whom he would solicitously befriend until the point that they could become legal. Along the way he acted yucky, sending the appropriately inappropriate signals, to seek out those who might eventually respond for either personal or careerist reasons, or some complex combination of both. The recognition of careerist motives does not in any way absolve Foley of a sophisticated and elaborate form of sexual harassment, but from a legal point of view, such charges might be difficult to establish. For one thing he could not expect to realize his sexual conquest until the victim was no longer under any form of his supervisory jurisdiction since by 18 he would no longer be in the page program.
None of this sanitizes Foley's behavior or the acts of omission and commission by those who aided and abetted him, but it does alert us to a potential problem down the line. The FBI might very well conclude that Foley's actions did not rise to a crime. Since expressing moral outrage at his disgusting behavior is not the charge of the FBI, at that point some will drop the matter. Since the stock in trade of politicians, the GOP in particular, is expressing moral outrage, the issue will not disappear, but some on the right will rationalize and justify the House leadership's inaction on the basis of a FBI finding of no illegality. That will not sit well with the hard core Republican constituency, but it might strike a chord with the main stream corporate media who will now have an excuse to drop aggressive pursuit of the case. After all to pick up the Gingrich argument, if they were all over 18, pursuing this further would now just be gay-bashing. It could let the Foley Five off the hook. In that case the electoral damage, short-term and long-term, to the GOP would still be significant, but not as great as one might now expect.